Spring 2009

In my senior year of high school I hacked together a Java applet that lets you explore the Mandelbrot Set, an incredibly fascinating and beautiful mathematical object.

I first came across it when I read Chaos by James Gleick in 10th grade. Right after that, I read Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach (like every other introspective nerd). This was my first glimpse of real mathematics. I had always thought I didn’t like math, but after seeing this I realized that I just didn’t like math class.

The Mandelbrot Set is the set of complex numbers \(c\) for which the orbit of \(0\) remains bounded under iteration of this beautifully simple equation: